


starkiller

by brophigenia



Series: that boy is a monster [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Fantasies of World Destruction, Gen, Hux Backstory, I'm Sorry, M/M, Sex For Survival, Sex Work, mentions of disordered eating, the birth of the first order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:03:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10974387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: you're a weaponand weapons don't weep.





	starkiller

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for prostitution, fantasizing about murdering entire galaxies of people, some vague suicidal ideation, sexual violence, and Snoke smiling horrendously. This is going to be part of a series that features, at least in some part, future kylux. Comment and tell me how awful I am. Lyrics at the beginning from Against Me!

_you were young_

_and you wanted to set the world on fire._

He grows up hardscrabble, dressed in utilitarian rags patched together to form some semblance of protection from the harshness of the Outer Rim atmos. There is never enough food to go around; there is especially never enough food to go around to properly nourish the bastard son of an ultimately disappointing commandant, no matter how spotless the man’s record. Armitage grows up shuffled from place to place; hunger pains become his normalcy. He is unafraid of black spots in his vision; he learns to work around them quickly, to concentrate on filling in the gaps with his mind. When he is older, he privately attributes this to his ease at puzzle-solving, at pattern identifying.

He goes from city to city with his father and their small band of old men and boys older than him, and they all learn quickly that there are many New Republic reformers who will pay good money for the privilege to take out old furies on the malnourished but proud bodies of the fallen empire’s sons. The other boys go first, because they have more years than he and because they fancy themselves martyrs for the cause, for their fathers’ wallets and their own stomachs. They come back weeping and full of terror and do not return to the dimly-lit high-class clubs where one goes to find such patrons, to ask for such treatment in return for a few credits.

Hux does not eat for three days after the last of them comes home bruised and trembling, spends his nights wide awake and wired, hiding from mildly acidic rain in slim alleyways and staring at the New Republican excess all around, the people smug beneath their alloy-infused umbrellas in their warm clothes going from restaurant to bar to cafe for dinner, drinking, breakfast, then back to their homes to sleep the day away in such luxury as Hux has never even laid eyes on properly but can imagine as well as if he’d spent years cradled within hand-high mattresses, dressed in velvet and bantha leather boots.

He makes his decision, and gets one of his weaker counterparts to loan him their boots, the least holey pair they have, and another to trade him their tunic for his. He scrubs his hair with rainwater and ignores the way it smarts against his scalp, finger-combs it until it lays neat and flat. He practices his sneer in a puddle, patterns it off of his father’s. _Rebel scum,_ the sneer says, _rebel pfssking scum._ He says _two hundred credits_ over and over until he’s got the Coruscanti accent right, until every syllable conforms to learned measure, swallowing up his bent-out-of-shape Outer Rim vowels.

He goes to the club that the oldest boy, the one whose back was scored in black and green even two weeks after his encounter, tells him about. They watch him leave their crouched, damp hideaway with bated breath and pity writ clear in every protective inward curl of their shoulders. _Better you than us,_ their eyes say, _but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but Luke Skywalker himself._

Armitage has had years to learn how to ignore hunger. The youngest ate last, after all. It would not do to waste resources on a mutt, much less the runt of the litter. His continued survival was like a mild surprise to most of the older men. His father would look upon him sometimes with distant shock, as if he’d forgotten that his only son had not died of malnourishment in infancy, despite the best efforts of any of the cosmic forces at play in their lives. He’s never had a pair of new boots; his feet are all leathery callus and scar tissue from miles walked in improper footwear. He lost two toes to frostbite when he was nine standard years old, the middle and next-to on his left foot. He slept on the stone and metal and rock-laden ground every night. His bones always ached, joints sore and muscles screaming at his ill use of them.

In comparison, letting a New Republic senator put him on his knees and gag him with his cock is almost laughably easy. Even the beating that comes during and after is less dramatic than he was expecting-- the senator is older than middle aged and his blows are not as harsh as those that he’d received from the other boys during sparring matches held at the behest of their fathers, who’d been determined to give them some semblance of a military education. He sneers through the whole thing, the same way he’d sneered _two hundred credits_ at the bar, after he’d refused a cup of fermented _something_ like he’d eaten sometime in the last seventy-two hours and had any room to be picky. Armitage will give this rebel the use of his body, but not the ruin of his pride. This is not kindness. There will be no forgiveness. After the man finishes and _finishes,_ his hands shake as he hands over the credits, fifty extra than their negotiated price. He is old enough to be someone’s grandfather; perhaps he has a grandson Armitage’s age, and that is why he looks so ashamed of himself all of a sudden, taking in the mess of bruises and blood on the pale skin of the half-dressed living ghost of the former regime on his floor.

Armitage takes the money, stuffs it into his pocket and roughly scrubs off the worst of the blood on his face with his shirtsleeve once he shrugs back into it. Once he’s far enough away, he separates out the credits. The other boys had brought back a hundred credits each, and he takes seventy-five for himself, secrets it away into his borrowed boot.

He doesn’t let them see him shake-- in the mirror at the New Republican’s domicile, his reflection had eyes like ice. He takes comfort in that.

His father and the other old men praise him in low tones with careful words, tell him that he is the only one worthy of the Empire’s legacy, that he is their greatest asset. He is fed first of all the young men, moves to the top of the hierarchy, is privy to secrets that before he had to learn from eavesdropping and guile. He buys a pair of used synthetic leather boots to wear that have no holes in them, and is for once in his life afforded the luxury of socks, knitted and thick. He only wears them on special occasions, because above all he keeps in mind that he must not lose his hardness. The reptilian glint in his eyes is what will keep him alive.

When he’s enduring the beatings and the sexual violence that the New Republic governors deem to be justice, fair trade, he begins to fantasize about the Death Star.

At first he thinks only of its mechanics, of the few and far-between holos he’d seen of it, flickering and dim and missing pieces of code. He thinks about every cog that must fit together in order for it to work, about the millions of pieces it must’ve taken, the time it must’ve took to fabricate all of that. The absolute harmony of the thing, to have been able to do what it did.

Next he thinks of the life of those on board; they must’ve had schedules. He thinks about a regulated way of life, about three square meals a cycle in a mess hall at designated times during the day. He endures kicks to the kidneys and thinks about tiny single bunk rooms, about access to ‘freshers and laundry facilities. He thinks about having sets of clothes for any occasion, about having plastic racks to hang them on and a small space made specifically to hold those racks.

Finally, one night when he’s been _purchased_ by a group so that three of them can watch idly as a fourth, a rare and lucky -depending on who one asked- Alderaanean who had been offworld when his home was destroyed, beats the ever-loving kriff out of him and buggers him with no preparation or lubrication, he thinks of the destruction of worlds. He imagines a dark horse, a station even bigger than the Death Star, a child’s fantasy come to life, big enough to destroy the entire galaxy. He thinks about an end to all of _this,_ about everyone in the world who hates him on principle dying all at once. He thinks about dying, too, but nobly-- for who could expect him to be able to withstand the force of kyber crystal canonfire? He thinks that this would be the only acceptable way for death to take him; he has not come all this way and done all of these things to die as normal men might.

He thinks of all this, snarls and says _pfssk off, rebel scum_ in his crispest Coruscanti, and afterwards he puts the eight hundred credits they pay him into his trouser pockets and he stalks off as if he doesn’t feel absolutely _gutted._

The next year, he is twenty standard years old and they have rejoined the rest of the Empire’s refugees, all of them on a junker transport ship headed to some secret location, and he is taken aside by his father and his father’s superior, a former General now the last of his kind.

They tell him about a primordial being, about the dark side of the Force. They say they have been in talks with this being, that they are going to a place where they will have all the resources they could ever want to build an army, to build a new regime. They say that the being-- that the _Supreme Leader_ wants to meet _him._ Armitage Hux. He has been noticed. He has been summoned.

He is too well-adapted to survival to not be utterly skeptical of this load of nerf shit, and yet he inclines his head gravely and says _of course, General, Commandant. I live to serve the Empire, long may she endure even under such circumstances and indignities._ It is the right thing to say.

When Armitage meets the Supreme Leader, he is twenty and still wearing synthetic boots. His tunic has had only one previous owner. He is afforded one meal a day, though sometimes he still skips days in order to keep himself accustomed to the grips of starvation. He combs his hair neatly and prepares himself as he has done time and time again to sell himself-- his body, before, and now his servitude, his belief in some alakazam space magic ridiculousness.

The hall is dark, naturally formed; a cave, damp, with crystals growing along its edges. He doesn’t look at them overlong because he has no use for crystals unless they can power canons. He stands at perfect military parade rest, waiting. Waiting for some half-crazed shaman who has fleeced his people out of their obedience for some promises of greatness and restoration.

Instead, the Supreme Leader appears, a wasted and terrible shell of a body that contains a presence large enough to fill the room. The Supreme Leader leans down and says his name in that terrible rasping voice and fills up his whole body with invasive phantom touches. It is disconcerting for a second, until he can compartmentalize it. He goes to the corner of his mind where he is hidden away, where there is nothing but shifting gears and bright flashes of light and millions of lives being extinguished all at once, indiscriminate and perfectly ordered in its ultimate chaos.

The Supreme Leader follows him into that locked corner, and suddenly they are standing together on what Armitage imagines the observation deck of the Death Star to have been like, all cool cold metal and large windows perfect for viewing utter destruction. His boots are shabby against the metal but when he looks down at them he can almost see another image transposed overtop of his much-repaired laces and recobbled heels-- shining bantha leather boots, black and high, with dove gray wool tucked into them neatly.

 _You have given much for nothing,_ the Supreme Leader says and doesn’t say, mouth not moving but words clearer than anything Armitage has ever heard. _You are weary, and hungry. And yet…_ the Supreme Leader’s wasted, skeletal mouth twists into a horrifying parody of a thoughtful smile. _You would do more._ They are no longer standing on the Death Star; instead they stand upon the main deck of another vessel, one Armitage has only ever seen in his fantasies or sketched out in the dirt of some sith-damned city, quickly erased and never forgotten. _I would ask more of you._

He sees himself then, instead of peering through his own fair-lashed eyes. He sees himself in charge of thousands of people, thousands of _soldiers,_ with a fine-tuned schedule and a blaster on his hip. He sees himself with the freedom to argue with the ignorance of others, because he does not have to curry favor with any of them. He sees himself wearing a crisp uniform and boots that were made for his feet and his alone, with an entire drawer full of socks and the unthinkable indulgence of a ginger cat like the one his Mother fed scraps to out of their hellhole tenements when he was a toddler, before she died as a shell of the great lady she once was, kept solely for companionship. He sees himself saying _fire!_ and destroying entire star systems.

 _Are you hungry still?_ the Supreme Leader asks.

 _Yes,_ Hux replies with wide eyes, caught off guard. _Yesyesyes._

Oh, yes.


End file.
